Loneliness

(excerpts)
What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great, noisy cities through which I would wander and lose myself. I thought of them the way I had thought of the ocean on my second or third night on Solaris, when I had wanted to go out and throw myself into the black waves.

I would immerse myself among people. I would be quiet and attentive, an understanding companion. There would be plenty of acquaintances, friends, women — perhaps even a wife. For a while, I would have to make a conscious effort to smile, to greet people, to stand up, to perform the thousands of small gestures that make up life on Earth. Before long, those gestures would become reflexes again.

I would find new interests and occupations. I would never give myself to them completely; never again would I give myself completely to anyone or anything. Perhaps at night I would look toward the dark nebula concealing the twin suns and remember everything, even what I am thinking now.

I would recall my fantasies and hopes with an indulgent, faintly sorrowful smile. And that future Kelvin would be no less worthy a man than the Kelvin of the past, who had once been ready for anything in pursuit of an ambitious undertaking called Contact. Nor would anyone have the right to judge me.

[…]

Despair and a kind of silent rage had sustained me while I worked at the computer. Now exhaustion had taken over, and I could not even remember how to lower a mechanical bed. I forgot to release the catches first and hung my whole weight on the lever. The mattress came crashing down on my head.

I took off my clothes, threw them aside, and collapsed onto the pillow without even bothering to inflate it. I fell asleep with the lights on.

When I opened my eyes, I had the impression that I had been asleep for only a few minutes. The room was bathed in a dim reddish light. It was cooler, and I felt better.

I remained lying there, uncovered and naked. The curtains were half open, and there, opposite me, beside the window illuminated by the red sun, someone was sitting.

It was Harey.

She was wearing a white summer dress that fitted closely around her breasts. She sat with one leg crossed over the other; she was barefoot. Motionless, her head resting against her sun-browned hands, she watched me from beneath her black eyelashes.

Harey, her black hair swept back.

For a long time I lay there looking at her. My first thought was reassuring: I was dreaming, and I knew it. Even so, I would have preferred her not to be there.

I closed my eyes and tried to drive the dream away. When I opened them again, Harey was still sitting opposite me. She pursed her lips slightly — an old habit of hers — as though she were about to whistle, but her expression was serious.

My thoughts turned to my recent reflections on dreams. She had not changed since the day I had last seen her. She had been nineteen then. Now she should have been twenty-nine.

But apparently the dead do not change. They remain forever young.

She continued to look at me, an expression of surprise on her face. I thought of throwing something at her, but even in a dream I could not bring myself to hurt someone who was dead.

I murmured:

“My poor darling, have you come to see me?”

The sound of my own voice frightened me. The room, Harey, everything seemed impossibly real. A three-dimensional dream, complete with the full range of colors…

On the floor I noticed several objects that I had not seen when I went to bed. When I wake up, I thought, I will check whether all these things are still here, or whether, like Harey, I saw them only in the dream.

“Are you planning to stay long?” I asked.

I realized that I was speaking very softly, like someone afraid of being overheard. Why should you worry about someone listening to you in a dream?

The sun was rising above the horizon. A good sign. I had gone to bed during a red day, which should have been followed by a blue day and then another red one. I could not possibly have slept for fifteen hours straight.

So it was a dream.

Reassured, I looked closely at Harey. Her silhouette stood out against the sun. The crimson rays illuminated the soft skin of her left cheek, while the shadows of her eyelashes fell across her face.

How beautiful she was.

Even in my sleep, my memory of her was astonishingly precise. I watched the sun move, waiting to see the dimple appear in its familiar, unusual place, just below the corner of her mouth.

Still, I would have preferred to wake up. It was time to get some work done. I squeezed my eyelids shut.

I heard a metallic sound and opened my eyes again. Harey was sitting beside me on the bed, still watching me solemnly.

I smiled at her.

She smiled back and leaned toward me. We kissed. At first it was a timid, almost childlike kiss, then longer ones followed. I held her in my arms for a long time.

I wondered how it was possible to feel so many things inside a dream. I was not betraying her memory, because it was precisely her I was dreaming of — her and no one else. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before…

Was that when I first began to doubt?

...

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. [DANTE]


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

The best of friends must part.